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An Exercise in Futility, 1/?
Date: 2012-06-15 01:06 am (UTC)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.