Beat of a Cazador's Wing

TITLE: Beat of a Cazador's Wing

AUTHOR: WotanAnubis

DISCLAIMER: I don't own Fallout: New Vegas or any characters from it. No profit is being made.

RATING: NC-17

NOTE: Porn. Porn never changes. Certainly not mine.

* * * * *

Step.

Drag.

Step.

Drag.

Step.

Drag.

The courier stumbled through the gloom of the cave, unhealthily lit by leaking barrels. Vault 34 was behind her, dim light was in front her. Neither really meant anything to her any more. Her Pip-Boy's Geiger counter screamed, but she no longer heard it. It had just become noise, no more meaningful than the ragged sound of her breath. She clutched her side even though she could no longer feel the wound still oozing blood through her armour.

Step.

Drag.

Step.

Drag.

In her right hand, possibly the only part of her body not obviously injured, she still held the Pulse Gun she'd ventured into this place specifically to find. She could no longer recall that, though. She wasn't even really aware that she was still holding it, though the claw-like way she held it suggested that some part of her irridiated brain would refuse to let the thing go no matter what. It was, perhaps, the same part of her brain that forced her to put her left foot forward and drag her crippled right leg along. She certainly wasn't doing it because she wanted to go anywhere. She didn't even really want to go to the light growing slowly brighter in front of her. It meant nothing to her. Not 'safety', not 'escape', not even 'outside'.

She shouldn't have gone into the Vault alone. But when her Geiger counter had started ticking, she'd sent her companions away to keep them safe. She'd thought she'd had enough Rad-X and RadAway to make it on her own. She might've been right about that, too, if it hadn't been for the feral ghouls infesting the place. Once she'd run into them, she should've just turned around and left. Instead she'd pressed on in the hopes of finding an obscure piece of technology for Veronica.

So now here she was, wounded, crippled, poisoned, about to die.

Step.

Drag.

Stumble.

Fall.

Black.

White.

A kind of grubby white. Not daylight at all. It took a while for the courier's brain to pull itself back into something resembling coherence, but when it did it slowly dawned on her that she was staring at the canvas of a tent. Also, she was lying on a mattress. A very grubby mattress, but that was still better than the stone floor of a cave. Or the dirt of a shallow grave, for that matter.

Where was she? How did she get here, for that matter? She remembered... nothing concrete. She'd been exploring a vault, hadn't she? Beyond that, she... No. She couldn't recall.

"Ah, you're awake."

The courier sat up, then hurriedly lay down again when her head throbbed in agony and purple spots exploded in front of her eyes.

"You'd better stay down for now," the voice said just a bit too late.

The courier carefully turned her head and was rewarded with the very welcome sight of a mostly white Followers labcoa