falloutkinkmeme_backup | Fallout Kink Meme Part IV: Closed to prompts, open for fills.

I think it'd be really interesting to see Arcade have the perfect companion within a F!Courier, who is extremely intelligent, shares his sense of humor, and has no conflict with his ideals.

So he's in love with her mind because she's absolutely wonderful and everything he'd really want in a lover, but obviously not attracted to her physically. And it causes some major inner conflicts.

Angst and fluff are both cool, I have no preference as to whether the Courier feels the same or if she's unaware.

This... this...

*cries* Seconded. Seconded with the fury of MARS.

Potential author-anon here feeling some Arcade-centric introspective sadfic coming on...

"Ereffep Medicines." Way to be subject-appropriate, Captcha.

_{Potential a!a became actual a!a after about five hours of nonstop inspired writing. I liked this prompt a lot, OP, and definitely enjoyed exploring the idea. Heavy on angst, just about void of fluff (unless you count Courier making Boone crack a smile), but I hoped you like it.

Characters: F!Courier; Craig Boone; Arcade Gannon
Tags: Angst; introspection; Arcade/F!Courier

This is only my second fill, following a Fawkes/LW one I did before, so... uh... are those tags acceptable?}

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Life could never just be simple. In fact, life could never seem to be anything but a long chain of catch-22s and crushing disappointments.

More than that, even, life had quickly become one big, energetic exercise in futility. He'd come a long way with the Remnants seeking refuge from the fighting and killing only to be swept up in a shiny new conflict even bigger and messier than the more personal conflict of survival in a world that wanted the Enclave buried six feet under and forgotten. He'd joined the Followers to make a difference only to be shuffled off into a corner to do research on extracting something life-saving from the barely-alive plantlife of the Mojave, something he found particularly amusing in his darker moments. A harsh desert landscape only had so many types of plantlife available that could survive it, and it seemed that very few of them bothered to have any sort of properties to support anyone else's health aside from the obvious use as food. Even that was hit and miss. A clever and handsome scientist still did not a wizard make, and for all the nobility of his newfound purpose he still couldn't extract anything life-saving from a handful of glucose and toxins.

The junkies were a particularly adorable futile effort, too. He couldn't blame them. The Mojave could drive just about anyone to the kind of desperation that begs any emotional crutch available, and he'd certainly found himself staring down units of Med-X from time to time. Funny how he could lie and tell other people it was just a little pinch and jam needles in them but couldn't do it himself. And Jet was just a disaster waiting to happen every time.

Other than that, the fear of God kept him clean. And by that he mostly meant Julie's impressively intimidating glare, and seldom seen but infinitely more impressive left hook.

Initially he'd kind of figured he was just finding another useless time-killer in the young courier who was sweet and snarky by halves, who'd blown into the Old Mormon Fort like a dust devil (not least because she was smudged with the stuff from head to toe). He'd never been particularly enthralled by the idea of siblings, so he didn't need any sister figures, and their relative ages aside he didn't need a mother anyway. He'd said Daisy was the only woman in his life and meant it. He had enough in the way of unorthodox family as it was, and the girl was useless to him as a lover for all the same old obvious reasons, so she counted for little except a welcome friendly distraction.

He'd thought he'd have to tell her as much to her face when he'd noticed the discrete appreciation in the way she took in his tall and too-gangly-for-his-age form - a prospect he hadn't savored for a minute, because his venom was, as it should be, directed solely at himself. He didn't enjoy putting other people down in the same morbid way he did to himself daily.

He'd taken the cowardly route and bitten his tongue, waiting for her to make a move before he had to shoot her down, but the move never came. Later he found her empathy came with a gaydar as finely tuned and telescopic as Boone's scope, so if she'd ever considered the potential for anything more blooming between them in the first place, she'd let it wither in the ground before it could break the surface.

So he wasn't quite sure how it had managed to get its foul little roots burrowed into him.

Looking back, he had trouble pinpointing when it had even happened. His romanticism was mostly of the idealistic sort aimed at better tomorrows rather than the people trying to build them, so he wasn't one to ponder the philosophical aspects of love on his cheeriest days.

He couldn't say if it was the kind of thing that kicked you in the head all of a sudden or slowly blossomed somewhere amidst the long process of acquaintanceship and familiarity, let alone which of these was his case. He liked to think there must have been an exact moment, a point of no return, when he'd taken the plunge into love (if that was what he could really call it), but the thing about plunges was that they were supposed to be sudden enough you should really notice them, and the thing about points of no return was that by their very nature you couldn't backtrack through them, making the process of identifying where they had lain in your path just another sort of maddening futility. Maybe knowing where and when he'd become hopelessly fucked would have made him feel better about it. Or maybe it would have made him feel worse.

Maybe there were multiple points along the way that he should have noticed, each one marking a milestone in his steady descent into a new kind of personal hell but going completely unnoticed while he was caught up staring at the scenery. Point number one, in that case, was probably defusing the conflict between the Kings and the NCR. Home for the admirably ambitious courier was surprisingly humble: Novac. So she really had little enough reason to be too concerned with the state of Freeside and the Strip, and all the petty squabbling therein. She should have been concerned with the bigger problem of the oncoming battle for Hoover Dam, and so should everyone else. She was concerned about that, but with so many bigger fights to win for that cause she should have had little interest in dealing with the short-sighted idiocy of meager factions fighting like fickle birds over stale crumbs with a hawk circling overhead picking oblivious targets at its leisure.

"Nostrum inimicum inimicus noster," he'd said to her with a sigh, reflecting on an old nugget of wisdom the Freesiders apparently weren't privy to, shaking his head as they jogged toward the train station to save both hot-blooded Kieran and hot-headed Pacer from themselves and each other. She'd shared the sigh, nodding sagely, but the small smile on her lips was as affectionate as an exhausted mother's.

She did care, about the whole and the parts that constituted it, and while the Followers fought an uphill battle dealing with the small stuff, she alone accomplished more than they ever dreamed even when she was spreading herself so thin dealing with that and more. Hell, she even found time to do half of their work for them.

Point number two might have been atop the tower at Helios One, staring across the horizon over the control panels and weighing her options. He would have loved to see the power diverted to the poor sections, to the Followers and their cause. He told her as much, and watched her falter, considering it. It would have been incredibly altruistic, just as diverting all the power to the NCR - despite it all, possibly the best hope New Vegas had against the Legion - would have been poignant. It would also have been handy to just get Archimedes II up and running, especially with the C-Finder sitting ominously in her pack. He had no doubt she intended to run head-long into the battle when it happened and try to deal with the Legate herself, and these days he had little trouble believing she could. With all the power of the sun itself on her side, that fight could be decided in five seconds flat.

But she hadn't given in to his ill-advised altruism, or the NCR's pressuring, or Archimedes' powerful temptation. "Redundancy," she'd told him wisely, making him feel like the short-sighted fool, and the pang in his chest as Helios One hummed to life, the one he'd mistaken at the time for disappointment sans resentment that he hadn't gotten his way might have been in fact the first warning sign that her way was already leading him into this emotional deathtrap.

And there were myriad points between, he was sure, among the late night conversations at the Lucky 38 when they were both too exhausted to sleep and too high strung to be fully awake. Those precious hours in the early mornings as the others rested fitfully and the two of them shot the shit over a bottle or three of well-aged wine, matching each other quip for quip, pitting their intellects against one another across the whole spectrum of medicine and science and philosophy. All the while he'd written her off because her soft curves fell far short of turning him on.

Her Latin was gleaned mostly from medical textbooks in her earlier years of training ("Sad to say, hefting mail across the wastes just paid better in the end."), and a lot spottier than his, but she picked up quickly and soon they were having entire conversations in a dead tongue over the din of Boone grinding his teeth and snarling just on principle.

Wait, there it was. That final moment when he'd found his path ending at a cliff's edge and walked right over it without noticing at the time. He could remember it now. After the horror of Nelson, after she'd cut loose the hostages and set them free from a town whose only crimson banner by then was the Legion blood flooding the streets. After watching Boone's hard features soften then harden then soften again as he found his words and told her, her ears always open for when her damaged friends found the courage to open up, of the atrocities he'd seen in the service. After she'd clapped the broken soldier on the shoulder and shared a moment of relieved silence with him, both of them enraptured by the afterglow of having done something right, and Arcade enraptured by the easy camaraderie she had with a man so difficult.

After they'd all, sore and more than a little bloody but energized in a strange and wonderful way, made their way straight toward Forlorn Hope to deliver the news and ask what help they could render when they were still so tired from doing so much.

After their path had taken them across the no-man's land between, and proved their relief at avoiding the grisly affair of mercy kills short-lived indeed in the faces of men who lay dying on the ground - not bound to crosses or surrounded by Legion and yet still completely beyond their reach. After she'd told the sniper whose weak but growing smile had been stolen all over again and replaced with that self-same hard and closed-off stare to sit and rest over the crest of a hill, out of sight, showing him the mercy of not making him be there to witness or assist with the rendering of mercy unto the doomed troopers. After she'd told Arcade as well to go take a load off for a minute, and after a moment spent deluding himself into thinking he was tough enough and brave enough to assist her with this, to not make her do it alone, only to nod numbly and follow Boone away, and sit silently and uncomfortably with him, sharing rations and straining despite themselves to hear the soft exhales of her silenced pistol ending lives that had already effectively ended in every way but the physical.

After she'd collected them, offering a smile that didn't quite reach green eyes glazed with tears she never let fall free, and they'd walked up to Forlorn hope betwixt the evidence of her grim work in a silence broken only by the morbid clatter of dogtags clutched in her white-knuckled fist.

The point of no return, he decided, had been several hours later, when he'd bathed and slept barely enough, then made his way to the infirmary to see what he could do to help while she was presumably out fighting another bloody battle. He'd found her there instead, bent over a leg with a grotesque compound fracture bloodily birthing a jagged mess of splintered bone into the hot desert air. She was still caked in the blood and dirt and panic of the night before but for her hands and arms, scrubbed shiny and pink to the elbows in preparation for the delicate work, and the circles under her eyes spoke of the dozens of cups of coffee she'd downed to stay alert while he was sleeping safely and soundly, oblivious.

It went without saying that those curves that set so many heads turning wherever they went even under a shapeless lab coat or her prized duster still did nothing for him, but Arcade still had an artful appreciation for the beautiful. And she'd looked harried and tired, small and drawn, her hair falling in haphazard strands from the bun she'd hurriedly tied. But somehow she'd also glowed with a white-hot brilliance whose name was justice and mercy and selflessness all at once, and even drawn so thin a woman so brave and sure seemed larger than life, larger than all of them despite barely coming up to his collarbone. She'd asked Boone, hovering a few feet behind her from habit or anxiety or lack of anything better to do, to hand her a pair of forceps, and he'd looked blankly back at her and said something self-deprecating in acknowledgment of his short-comings where "this super-doctor shit" was concerned.

She'd laughed. Laughed like she hadn't tasted Legion lead and steel a dozen times herself in the past day, laughed like she hadn't looked into so many wide and pained eyes and taken so many innocent lives when the idealistic medic in her had to be screaming that there must be another way. Either because she was really that strong or because her friends needed to see her that way to feel strong enough themselves, she'd laughed like a twenty five-year-old woman ought to laugh, freely, with untainted mirth infectious enough that even Boone managed to find another smile somewhere in him as she pointed him toward the needed forceps. Spattered in her own blood and that of dozens of other people, worn out from long days and sleepless nights on end of walking and fighting, wrist-deep in someone else's lateralus dorsii when all she must have wanted in the whole world was a long hot bath and an even longer sleep, she'd laughed in a way that eased the suffering of everyone else around her.

Her own troubles, her own suffering, it never mattered.

She was the hero the wasteland needed and the wastelanders had never ever deserved.

She was the first and only woman Arcade had ever loved this way, but he still couldn't love her the way she had every right to be loved - fully, mind and body. His heart swelled and soared when he spoke to her, in ways the rest of his anatomy would never be able to manage. In her presence he felt healthier than he ever had, but neither could ever offer the other a healthy kind of romance. The first clean and most perfect thing to ever blow into his life came with more crushing disappointments and catch-22s attached. He wanted her in ways he couldn't have her, and if he tried he could have her in ways he'd never want.

Harboring feelings like this was just another exercise in futility, but she'd already gotten under his skin too deeply to ever get her out.

His heart swelled, and broke.

Author-Anon here, rereading and picking apart my own work and finding myself highly disappointed in the obnoxious frequency with which variants of the word 'blood' shows up in parts of this. It sure would be nice if I could manage to not be redundant, wouldn't it?

nah, I didn't notice it at all until you pointed it out. And the paragraph I assume you refer to was all about blood so you kinda had to anyway.

A!A DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO SHUT HIS DAMN MOUTH. Just saying, never trust Google Translate, kids. Looking back, with my absolute lack of knowledge about Latin, it seems my attempt failed and will probably translate horribly if anyone else runs it through a translator or happens to read Latin well anyway.

Arcade was attempting to say "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." And would have said it perfectly well if his intellect weren't being filtered through my lack thereof.

But fuck that forever

Heh, you and everyone. Google translate is what we got. I doubt anyone expects A!As to be fluent in Latin ;)

Anyway, I adored this short story. It made me work hard to read it in places, due to your (pleasingly) complex sentence structure, but that's just 'cos I've gotten lazy over the years.

If you do any more stories about this Courier, I'd be certain to read them!

You know, in high school I failed to read A Tale of Two Cities (just like I failed to read anything that was assigned to me just on principle) mostly because I got through the first paragraph and realized the only period in it was at the end. One. Big. Sentence. I was like "Fuck you, Dickens." Not too long later, a friend who was proofreading one of my essays for me told me that my writing is about as convoluted as Dickens'. So I punched him in the mouth. (Great way to solve debates, let me tell you.)

GLAD YOU LIKED IT THOUGH. <3333

This is absolutely amazing. Well written, beautiful, and I'm a sucker for a sad ending, honestly. I loved it A!A. :D

This prompt grabbed me and your fill did it justice. When I got to the end I wanted more, but where you ended it worked. I loved it and I would love to see you write more!

OP here. I've been offline for quite some time so imagine my surprise when I saw that this had been filled! I couldn't be any happier with the way it turned out. I absolutely loveloveLOVE your writing style, A!A, and this was everything I could've asked for and more. It was amazing and your courier was perfect.

Thank you so much for the fill, I enjoyed it immensely and I'm so glad you decided to do it!

Hoolay! Since writing a fill is fulfilling someone's request for a story, I always oddly look at it as making a sort of gift for the OP. So while I love hearing what people thought of the piece, I'm always especially concerned with whether the OP liked it or not. Soooo I'm really glad you enjoyed it. :3

I really really liked this. Your writing style is pleasantly different and thought provoking. I really enjoyed this :) keep writing for the kink meme kid. We could use some writers like you around here :)

YOUR WRITING STYLE SEEMS REALLY FAMILIAR... But anyways, this was a excellently written fic. I love reading stories where characters with incompatible sexualities try to find a way and have lots of angst over that (I'm a sucker for some good angst).

Also hoping you'll write plenty more fics here on the meme!

It's not something I'd ever explored before. I mean, angst yes, incompatible sexualities no. Very interesting concept to me.

Hahaha. Familiar like you've read something else from me on the k!meme, or familiar like you actually might know me from somewhere?

It's such an interesting concept to me too, and not one I see explored often in fics or anywhere else, really. So it's always awesome to see it written well.

And I meant that I might've read something of yours on a different k!meme (though I could be totally wrong here, ahaha).

I've only been a filler for the past couple weeks, actually. The only other K!Meme I've submitted to is Skyrim, and even that has only begun as of this past weekend. So unless you happen to be thinking of a very very recent Skyrim fill, chances are, unfortunately, you are indeed wrong. But that's okay! Just means there's another authornon out there somewhere with similar syntax, and I can only hope that they're an awesome, awesome authornon far better than myself. Because those authornons are the best authornons.

gosh so beautifully written a!a, your arcade voice is spot on. heartbreaking and heartwarming all at once.

Fallout Kink Meme Part IV: Closed to prompts, open for fills.

F!Courier/Arcade - Mind, Not Body

Re: F!Courier/Arcade - Mind, Not Body

Re: F!Courier/Arcade - Mind, Not Body

An Exercise in Futility, 1/?

An Exercise in Futility, 2/?

An Exercise in Futility, 3/?

An Exercise in Futility, 4/4

Re: An Exercise in Futility, 4/4

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Re: An Exercise in Futility, 4/4

Re: An Exercise in Futility, 4/4

Re: An Exercise in Futility, 4/4

Re: An Exercise in Futility, 4/4

Re: An Exercise in Futility, 4/4

Re: An Exercise in Futility, 4/4

Re: An Exercise in Futility, 4/4

Re: An Exercise in Futility, 4/4

Re: An Exercise in Futility, 4/4

Re: An Exercise in Futility, 4/4

Re: An Exercise in Futility, 4/4

Re: An Exercise in Futility, 4/4

Re: An Exercise in Futility, 4/4