#THEN i went to another settlement right after that and the brahmin was clipped into the fucking building

[scp2337]

best thing about Fallout 4 is that, thanks to that classic bethesda polish, the cows in game are big and beautiful and dumb just like real cows but also sometimes they accidentally teleport onto a roof and immediately accept that they just live there now

now THATS realistic gaming

[izzyovercoffee]

iii. gotta have your face to the sky

They all said the same thing: Lady Luck’s blessing ain’t earned, it’s given, and you gotta be open to receive. But how to receive meant a different thing to every son-of-a-gun with a head still on his shoulders and one hand still workin’ enough to line up a sight and pull a trigger.

Superstition.

It was always a might tricky workin’ with the paranoid and delusional folk out on the desert---the kind of desert that was all hard rock and long sun, not rolling sands and sinking earth. Different kind of person to be found on the hard roads that had to live there, versus the ones that were only settled for a night between the place they come and the place they go.

Carmichael knew the score all too well.

Lady Luck, someone said to him once, showed up in a long dress with sharp heels and a sharp glass with the bar’s best in hand to look at you from under a smokey eye. Another told him Lady Luck had come up from around the river bleeding out into the dam and pursed her lips with a smile, then dragged his brother down to the current, then down under.

Gotta leave a cap out for Lady Luck. Gotta buy a drink out. Gotta open doors for the ladies, pull out seats, let them eat first. The damned lists go on, and on, until all the rituals in the Mojave blended together to some fool’s song.

Carmichael never much concerned himself with luck, or having it, or not having it. He lived a long, long time---long compared to the betting average of 30-odd before the deadbeats dropped, and 40 for the supremely lucky or supremely violent.

Men like him didn’t live to lose count of the years if all they did was depend on luck and superstition.

Didn’t mean he didn’t believe in Her, though. You just didn’t see him bending ass over head to be extra contorting to any beautiful woman that walked into a room, through a door, into the light, or sung on a mic. Hell, ask him thirty, forty, years ago about his opinion, and all he’d say is a firm-if-unsteady maybe she do, maybe she don’t, exist.

That was the safe line to take---don’t deny the Unseen to the Seen, and the Unseen don’t have to make a lesson outta you to reassert their position in the world.

Superstitions, and all that. That was the only one he’d subscribed to.

That all changed in time, of course. All things must change, after all.

Survive in a shit world, you learn how to adapt to survive. Learn how to change, how to see the signs, respect the dead and pray to the living to do the right fucking thing every once in a while, if they’d any sense and wanted to live half as long as he’d done already.

It weren’t an opinion he ever shared with anyone, save Charlie.

Charlie. That’s when he took the sightings of Lady Luck a little more seriously.

Lady Luck, is what Charlie called one strange as fuck woman.

His partner---a hard man, harder still for the anger in him that turned sharp, and bitter, with no outlet and no direction between shaking hands---raged adamant in the Lady’s walk on the long roads. Weird shit couldn’t be explained he ended up chalking out to her swinging by.

Being around Charlie for so long, hearing him wax and wane at odd intervals over long hauls with two baby brahmin still learning to get used to carrying large packages---who could blame Carmichael for tuning him out?

But eventually some things started to wiggle and sink in.

The stray bullet that clipped the armor of his shoulder when it should’a hit his head. The Deathclaw that tripped half a step and blew the fuck up on an old landmine no one’d seen until it blew the fuck up. The rad storms that soaked up hell from The Divide dissipated before it could cross their paths and sick their brahmin.

Little things. Things couldn’t be controlled, but superstition felt validated, felt good, felt right to say Lady Luck took a shine on him tonight because maybe, just maybe, he was a little bit kind, a little bit soft, a little bit pay-it-forward before they left their last rest with other people.

So maybe he never did see Her. Never saw the woman in the long gown with the perfect smile and the hands soft as a feathers. Maybe he never saw the old woman who could use a bottle of purified water to stave off the Mojave thirst. Maybe he never held open a door for a sweetheart weren’t lookin’ in the right direction.

Maybe it was all in his head.

Everyone in the Mojave havin’ mass hallucinations of some nameless women grazing their arms and witness their luck turn right the fuck around that night. Some things were just a roll of the metaphysical dice, and he didn’t want to lean too hard one way or another if that dice went rolled by a pair of elegant ungodly hands.

He stopped believin’ it was all just in Charlie’s head when Lady Luck came bearing down on them from through a goddamn set of old stained-glass windows, silent as the night before she smashed the glass and blew two Legionnaires away with a shotgun that didn’t look like it should hold together after two rounds, much less tear through thick Legion armor like ragged teeth.

Lady Luck had a name he heard and didn’t register because nobody, and he meant nobody, ever had the jump on his ass before and that should have meant he was a dead motherfucker---‘cept he was very much not dead, mostly alright, with a woman lacking hair and sense holding out a stimpack to him in the dark.

“Thanks,” he waved it away. “But I’m a’right.”

She shrugged and tucked it into the inner pocket of her bomber, and toed the closest dead bastard with a twist of dry lips. Way she angled her head to look at him headlong, he couldn’t remember another who did that.

“I was huntin’ these fucks a while,” she said. “Lucky I caught up when I did.”

“Yeah,” he said. Scratched his head. “Real lucky.”

She holstered the scrapped together shotgun, and looked back up the window. He didn’t believe his eyes, but this what he saw her do: climb up and out the fucking window.

The door was right there.

And that was the first time. Charlie didn’t say a fuckin’ thing, but Carmichael saw it on his face the way he looked at him after she’d gone back out into the night: You saw that, right?

Unfortunately.

Second time, he’d gone into the Tops Casino with Charlie to make a delivery personally ordered by some important schmuck Carmichael couldn’t remember the name of and didn’t care to be reminded. And there he saw her---almost didn’t recognize her, neither, for the hair she had growing outta her head where there’d been none, and the dress she wore that hung to the floor in a shimmer he thought he’d never see again in the world attached to a garment. She’d traded the hard plates of armor, thick pants, impossible trench for a slip of a thing that left little to the imagination, and when she turned her head to view the door…

She’d turned and angled in a way that echoed the fucking night he’d thought was little more than a bizarre fever dream.

And then she smiled. And she waved.

And Charlie got done with his delivery, and dragged Carmichael out to have a nice goddamn dinner for once, partner, and when the dinner was done---he’d gotten word from another caravanner’d been out on the town that fucking Benny, owner-of-the-tops-casino Benny, Benny the backstabbing son-of-a-bastard Benny, the checkered suit wearing cigarette smoking conniving motherfucker Benny, was dead as a doornail.

Cut and bled out in his bed, in his sleep, after a night with a dashing dame whom no one caught the name.

“Our Lady Luck,” Charlie had said in bed that night. They’d gotten a little advanced delivered to them, personal and sweet-and-easy, for another shipment and delivery, after the news, well after dinner.

“Dress don’t suit her,” he said, quiet, in the dark, and Charlie laughed.

“It did the job, didn’t it.”

That it did.

Third time’s the charm, is what they used to say. Third time’s the charm.

They were right.

Third time, they’d come along the side of the road west and out of the Mojave---over a sprawling piece of land no longer living, surrounded by hellfire and rads that even a coupl’a ghouls like them might’a had hard time soaking up over the long haul. So they walked a little south, and then east, ‘stead of west, and came across a young woman pushing cloth to her eyes as if she could soak up the sadness that spilled out of her with no end in sight.

She looked up and Carmichael looked down and he saw the face of Lady Luck torn and shredded, two sewn up surgical scars that marred the hair that didn’t want to grow in the same space as a dead memory.

“Y’all headed East?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Come on,” Charlie said. “Stand up, and dust off. You can cry on the way.”

And she did.

And that was the best fucking decision they’d ever made.

A year gone by on the open road damn near ended them---except it didn’t, and it didn’t for the extra pair of hands at their side. Sure, Charlie wakes up sometimes in the middle of the night with a start and a frantic hand searching for comfort or Carmichael, but that beat the alternative.

Alternative’s them both six feet under and a hurt soul trapped in a hell of her own making after exacting the kinda luck the Mojave didn’t ask for but sure as hell deserved.

Hell, alternative might still find them there---but Lady Luck looked Death in the eye and asked for an extension, and she got it for them. Every time Charlie so much as curses the state of the world, the sky, and the shit food this settlement stop offered them, Carmichael thanks his lucky stars and the good decisions they’ve made.

Maybe he wasn’t so sold on the superstitions bit. But the Lady wandering the land in perplexing image, inconsolable and irreconcilably different each time?

Yeah. Yeah, maybe he might come around to becomin' a believer just yet.