#like I understand I’m trying a divot into a canyon but it’s like

[dykedvonte]

Love your Benny posts but I thought I might help clarify something. You wrote -> “He goes on benders according to Swank so he really isn’t above all the “missing the tribal days” syndrome all the other Chairmen have.” Tommy Torini is the one who mentions Benny goes on benders. However that’s not actually the case. Benny is actually using the secret escape tunnel in his room to leave The Strip without anyone knowing. Everyone assumes he’s on a bender because he locks himself in his room. Tommy even mentions Benny usually is gone for a couple a days but this time his bender was a month long. We know Benny wasn’t on a month long bender because he was killing and taking the platinum Chip from us. Anyway love your Fallout New Vegas posts sorry to ramble!

Oh I forgot it was Tommy!

But what I was implying was that this behavior wasn’t unusual enough in the first place that people were suspicious from the start. Swank has been handling all the casino business stuff and he talks about it in a way that it makes it seem like he’s used to it, but is gotten harder since Benny started his plan (unbeknown to everyone). I’m aware of the tunnel but I was mostly filling in for the before stuff cause even when you get to the Strip, Benny is just stsnding around doing jack shit and not helping. I can imagine he is slightly less of an opener hater to the other parts of the Strip and visits. I mean people gotta have met the dude at least a few times to have such a universal hatred for him.

The tribal nostalgia is really directed towards his odd adherence to Boot Rider traditions in a Chairman way. The only thing we really know about out their specific hierarchy and structure is respect and honor are valued greatly and were at least expressed through sparring/combat a lot (how Benny became chief and how grateful he is if you choose to take him to the pit). I’d also like to point out the Khans are the ones that just wanted him to shoot the Courier with the bag over their head and Benny insisted they didn’t.

It’s inconsistent and it’s why I harked on them cause Benny is insistent on moving away from the past and the game shows it with how hard it is to get any real detail about what anything pertaining to other aspects of his past.

[funkymeihem-fiction]

Chapter 10

She dreamed that the sun was coming up in the middle of the night, rising from the horizon and consuming the stars with its light, smothering them one by one. Its rays fell across her and she could feel its glow burning her from the inside. Hot. It was too hot. She thrashed slightly, trying to kick away the top of her sleeping bag, pushing at the heavy fabric, but found that she was quite unable to move. She felt pinned, like a vice had been fastened around her middle, and the more she moved the tighter it became. Snapping from her slumber with a little squeak of alarm, she blinked rapidly and tried to focus…finding both the source of the uncomfortable pressure and the heat that plagued her.

Junkrat was nestled against her side, curled almost in a fetal position with one arm locked around her sleeping bag and his head bowed, breath a muffled high-pitched little wheeze of a snore as he snuggled deeper into the fabric. She groaned, finally managing to slither one arm out of his grip, finding her glasses and shoving them on. Irritation turned to concern when she saw that he had apparently abandoned his bedroll completely and was sleeping on bare, cold sand. He was shivering, and without his maniac grin and twisted expressions…he looked almost pitiable, just a dirty and malnourished young man seeking any source of warmth and comfort he could find, even while dreaming.

He probably would have taken offense to her pity if he’d been awake, she knew. The junkers were not the type who liked to show weakness.

But he wasn’t awake.

She tried not to disturb him, and shifted slightly under his arm, still pinned in the wad of fabric as she spotted movement out of the corner of her eye. Roadhog was apparently up and about already, and Mei cleared her throat a little, lifting her voice to a loud whisper. “Roadhog! Mr. Hog! Uh…help?”

There was a rumbling breath, something she could have sworn was an exasperated sigh as the giant man trundled over. He was a bit more brusque about the matter than she, one gloved hand gripping his smaller partner’s arm, the other closing around Mei’s shoulder before he simply pulled the two apart. Junkrat’s arm was shoved downward and Mei was pulled up out of her sleeping bag like a spring daisy, popping free as he hauled her upright and set her down lightly. Jamison’s expression tightened and he made a strange little noise she couldn’t quite put her finger on, an almost angry whimper, before Roadhog simply wedged one foot under his middle and unceremoniously rolled him off the sand and on top of Mei’s bag. She watched this happen with wide eyes, completely expecting him to wake up and start swinging or swearing at them both, but he remained soundly asleep, curling back up with his face tucked into his arms. She took her coat and tried to drape it over his bare chest, but could only watch as his seeking fingers curled into the fabric and promptly pulled it right back off him, hugging the bundled fabric like a stuffed bear and burying his face into it once more.

She gave Roadhog a helpless look and gestured to the still-sleeping Junkrat with a baffled air, but the larger man simply shrugged his broad shoulders and turned away. She abandoned her coat in Junkrat’s death grip, moving over to his original bedroll and pulling off his patched and ragged blanket, wrinkling her nose at its state before turning and covering his skinny form. He muttered something obscene under his breath before stilling once more, and Mei left him to meander after his bodyguard.

She fell into step beside the much larger man. “Is that normal?”

“He does that.”

“To you too? Does he try to…what is the word…cuddle, you?”

“Mm. Nearly put his lights out the first time he did it. You get used to it. Not his fault how he is.” He leaned down to pick up the massive metal hook by his bike, attaching it to the length of chain and testing its heft before turning and abruptly starting to wander away from their campsite.

Mei glanced back at Jamison. “Where are you going? Shouldn’t we stay and watch him?”

“Breakfast. Proper breakfast. He’ll be fine. Come on.”

That gave her pause. Roadhog was inviting her somewhere? He had paid her little attention so far and she had not pressed the matter. But the elder junker was already turning the bend into the next gulch, and she finished pulling her boots on before hurrying after him. “Oh! Okay, wait for me!”

He still wasn’t the chatty type, and the two walked along in relative silence save for his labored breathing. There wasn’t much to see in the canyons, little but rocky red walls towering on both sides of them against the yellow-pink of the morning sky, the occasional trash or graffiti from campers before them, and the little scrubby shrubs growing in the relative comfort of the canyon’s provided shade. She kept hoping he might strike up some sort of conversation, but after nearly a half-hour of silence, she decided it was time she took the initiative.

“What did you mean earlier?”

“Hm?”

“You said it wasn’t his fault how he is. Was he not always like…how he is?”

Hog shrugged a massive shoulder. “I’ve only known him a few years, when he approached with his ‘business deal’. Outback had taken a toll on him by then. He might have been different before. It’s not his fault.” He leaned down, throwing down one knee as his dirty fingertips inspected the ground, snorting before changing direction and heading further into a nearby gully.

She dutifully followed after him, arms folded behind her as she trailed him. “The radiation?”

“The omnium blew when he was just a child. It got into his head when he was still young. Still not sure how he survived, his stories always change. I don’t think he remembers.”

“I remember seeing the news about it when I was younger. They said terrorists had blown the reactor core. It was so terrible, I still remember feeling so helpless when they were showing all those awful pictures. Wo de tian na, all those poor people…”

Roadhog was quiet for a very long time, still trudging steadily ahead before answering, “Yeah…”

He turned and approached a divot in the sandy gulch bottom, gesturing her forward as he knelt down. Mei watched as he examined the greenish-yellow shrub before lifting its branches up to reveal the small magenta berries beneath. “Ruby saltbush… looks ripe enough. Take these.”

“Oh…We’re foraging! That’s what we’re doing!” Mei snapped her fingers before kneeling down next to him, starting to pluck the berries from their stems.

“What did you think we were doing?”

“I thought…I don’t know, maybe you wanted to talk to me?” She trailed off lamely, pretending to be suddenly very interested in the saltbush. “But, that’s okay. It might not be weather-related, but it’s interesting to see how people survive in the outback.”

“Your MREs taste like shit. And I’ve eaten a lot of bad things in my time.”

“Well..I.. I didn’t choose them! Jamison and I even asked for the better quality stuff, but this was considered a non-essential mission so they gave us the cheap ones. But I ordered extra just in case so we wouldn’t go hungry, plus we don’t- Where are you going now?”

“Rock fig, pick that one next.” He grunted in reply, pointing to another nearby plant as he strode forward once more. “And I did want to talk to you.”

“Oh?” She paused to examine the plant, what he had called a rock fig, a hardy-looking scrub growing straight out of the rockface, dotted with tiny orange and brown fruits. Waiting for his reply, she got to picking, tucking them into the makeshift basket in the fabric of her shirt.

“Are you flirting with Fawkes just so he’ll help with your mission. Or just because he's around.”

Mei froze, one hand halfway out to pick another berry. A very pregnant silence hung in the air before finally her head swiveled to look his way. Her jaw tightened, lips moving as she tried to find words, her voice finally cracking through with uncharacteristic hostility. “H-how! How could you say that!”

Roadhog seemed unphased as ever, the white lenses of his mask unflinching. “Doing my job.”

She sputtered with righteous indignation, counting to ten before she even attempted an answer. “I’m t-trying to understand your…concern. B-but I would never do something like that and I don’t appreciate the insinuation. This operation is important to me, but I would never do that to any of my teammates. Especially him!” She was on the verge of tears despite doing her best to be calm. Confrontation was not one of her strong suits, especially when she couldn’t ice-block her way out of it. “I know he’s not…He’s not like most people. But he’s himself, and he can be really nice, and he’s smart! And also strangely more sensitive than I had thought! And I would never, ever-”

He held up one gigantic hand. “Just checking.”

She gestured a palm to him in disbelief. “Just checking? I do not appreciate being accused of something like that.”

“Don’t want to deal with the fallout once we go back to base if you start pretending not to know him again. I think we’ve both been exposed to enough fallout. And I don’t like complications.”

She started to answer when he paused and grasped his hook, stomping one huge metal-spiked boot into the ground and he grunted and heaved, the heavy metal weapon spinning through the air. There was a screeching noise from further up the rocky valley, which turned into a wet gurgle. A moment later he began pulling on the chain, winding it back as he reeled in a large black and gray lizard, smearing blood on the sand where the hook had pierced its sternum.

She stared at the still-twitching body, argument caught in her throat before she swallowed it down and whispered, “W-was that just a threat?”

He looked down at her, calmly going to pry the carcass off his hook before wiping it on the ground. “No. This is a meal. It has nothing to do with my question. I don’t bother with threats.”

She tried to calm herself, placing a hand to her chest. She had to give him that one. The old junker was normally the silent type, and while Junkrat was the sort to spit extremely creative threats and descriptions of bodily harm at his foes, she’d never heard the bodyguard do the same. True, he would bellow and laugh after a particularly gruesome kill, but he was always very…straight-forward, as far as his rampages went.

“Well I…I also wouldn’t do something like that either. That would just be cruel. But we’re not…you know, I mean, we haven’t…Er…” She stared down blankly at the assortment of berries in her shirt. “I don’t know what it is. But I’m not some…liáng xīn bèi gŏu chī le. I am not going to hurt him. And I hope he won’t do the same.”

“All right.”

“…All right? That’s it?”

“Mm.” He finished tying the dead goanna to the side of his belt before trundling off again. “Just wanted an answer. Come up here, there’s another saltbush. I’ll show you how to prepare them so you won’t get the runs.”

She gave him a look that was half reproach and half confusion. “Er…okay. Thanks? And I hope we’re both on the same page now? Everything is good, right?”

“Mm. For now.”

They returned to their campsite later on in the morning, after the sky had long since turned from the yellow of morning to the brilliant blue of day. Junkrat had already awakened and was sitting on his blanket tinkering with his grenade launcher, Mei’s coat tied loosely around his shoulders. He had just finished applying a new coat of yellow paint and several new smiley-faces to the gun when he spotted his teammates arriving. “Oi! Where’d you two get off to!”

She held up one of the berries from her collection. “We decided to let you sleep in. Mr. Roadhog was teaching me about outback foraging. There should still be time for a late breakfast if you’re interested…”

“Foraging? Didja get anything good? Heh, that Roadie can be a fuckin’ chatterbox if you let ‘im, eh? What’d you talk about, Roadie?”

Roadhog grunted.

Jamison swung upright, loping over in his uneven gait to greet Mei instead, slithering behind her and wrapping his lanky arms around her neck as he inspected the mess of fruits in her shirt. “Bush tucker berries? Lemme tell ya, those things make for some shitty smoothies. I’ve tried. Er…Also, think I might’ve stolen your bag at some point, woke up in there. And then I think I stole your coat. I mighta stolen some other things too, I forget.”

“Oh. It’s fine. I was a little cold this morning is all, so I asked if you’d move nearby. You were so sleepy you probably don’t remember.” She offered him a half-smile, hoping her little white lie would spare an awkward conversation about his sleep-cuddling. They could deal with that later. “How are you feeling?”

“Better after a good night’s rest! And would feel real good if, ya know, maybe a lil’…” He pursed his lips and made a few exaggerated kissing sounds as he started to lean down towards her face.

“Nice try,” she smirked, reaching up with her free hand to take his chin and guide his lips to land on her cheek instead.

“Aw, Mei! Shoot a bloke right through the heart, why don’t ya.”

“I have a feeling you’ll live. Besides, Mr. Roadhog has something for you to do.”

Roadhog rumbled from behind them. “Cook this.”

“Huh?” He barely had time to turn about before the dead goanna was hurtling through the air, smacking him in the face as he fell backwards. “AUGH!”

He landed in a tangle of gangly limbs, peeling the lizard off him as his usual grin spread across his face. Holding it up by the tail, he dangled it in front of Mei. “See! Roadie’s got the idea of it! This here’s a proper breakfast! You sure you don’t want? I’ll save you the best paaaarts.” He jiggled the dead animal back and forth temptingly.

She gave him an unimpressed look. “Vegetarian. Wǒ bu chī ròu. No thank you.”

He had already found a knife and before she could even protest, he proceeded to lean down and slit the slain goanna straight up the middle, digging a hand inside the red wet pulp inside and holding up a palm full of small white eggs in his stained palm, thrusting them under her nose. “You sure? Look, it was a lady sort, comes with some prime outback caviar!”

Mei turned a shade greener than usual, shaking her head quickly and clapping a hand over her mouth. “Would you mind doing that behind the van?”

He looked at her blankly for a moment before her reaction seemed to hit home, nodding furiously. “Oh! Oh, roight, the veggie thing! Suppose I shouldn’t be smearing this dead animal all upside your face and whatnot!”

“Thank you.”

Junkrat was practically doing a jig as he went to finish his butchery. She sat down with Roadhog instead, who had approached her with a bowl of water. He lowered his immense weight to thud down next to her, and helped her along as they sorted the assortments of berries. He spoke little, occasionally muttering a correction or a new instruction as he showed her how to tell the ripe apart from the unripe, throw away the ones with the black spots, and how to carefully peel the bitter outer layers from the tiny desert fig berries. It was almost a pleasant task, mindlessly peeling and washing the stacks of forage fruit.

She couldn’t help but fret slightly, remembering his words from earlier. They still burned. She hadn’t really thought ahead to any repurcussions from her and Jamison’s little kisses. Had Roadhog genuinely been concerned that she would ‘dump him’ as soon as the operation was over? Could you even dump someone if you weren’t together? Were they together? She couldn’t at all be sure that she and Jamison were working on the same terms of what kisses could mean or what a relationship was. Did she intend to continue things after they had returned to Gibraltar? She would have to explain to everyone what she was doing with a known agent of destruction and chaos. She’d have to deal with his strange mannerisms out in the real world. She’d have to be involved…Oh no, had Roadhog’s concerns been completely warranted?

The giant junker took notice as she stopped peeling. He tilted his masked head down at her slightly, noticing her stricken expression before simply grunting and lifting himself off the ground with some trouble. “Finish these. I’ll get the rest started.”

He took the camp stove with him, leaving Mei there on the blanket with nothing but the bowl, the berries, and her thoughts.

It had been a spur of the moment thing. They had been getting along better than usual, had become closer through strife and then physically closer when they had kissed. And she had been sincere when she spoke of his better qualities. He could be kind, he could be generous, and he was exceedingly smart. Smarter than she had first suspected when meeting him. But for all their little tête–à–tête around the campfire, things would change once they left Australia…once they returned to the real world and real society and real people. For all his good traits, he had more than his share of bad ones. He had a temper that could change on a dime, a forgetfulness that bordered on amnesia at times, an undeniable love of pyrotechnics and destruction, and a disregard for human life that she simply could not share. She would have to be involved every time he got himself into trouble, and she had neither the physical prowess nor the silent patience of Roadhog.

She shook her head slightly, trying to clear it as she blankly resumed peeling and washing their morning’s forage.

She knew the way he looked at her, but what if that was merely infatuation? Another one of his phases? For all she knew, he had fixated on and treated numerous other crushes the same way. Maybe he bothered them the way he bothered her. Like that time he had been worried about her and took half a kitchen’s worth of food with him to make sure she was eating all right? All those goofy little jokes he always threw at her in an attempt to get her to smile for him? Or making her her favorite flavor teas on the offchance she’d want to drink with him, or comforting her after her mistakes with the dog back in the valley breeze, or his promises that no matter what happened or what troubles they would face, he would be there with her no matter what?…

She glanced up as she heard his high-pitched giggles from behind the van, followed by Roadhog’s booming chuckle. They sounded happy.

She had told Roadhog that she was not a cruel person and had become more than a little indignant at the very thought of it, but he had been completely right to worry. She shouldn’t make promises she wasn’t sure she could keep. It was easy to forget that they were on official business for Overwatch, that once they left this sun-blasted desert, they would have to return to reality. Reality was where Junkrat performed poorly. Doubt was a reasonable thing to have. She was talking about a man whose idea of a good time was replacing Lucio’s birthday candles with little sticks of dynamite. Which had, in all honesty, been very amusing up until she had had to help clean it all up.

She would have to sit down with Jamison and talk to him. Really, really talk to him, about what had happened. Maybe about what shouldn’t have happened at all…

“Oi, Mei! You got any of that sanitizey stuff? That goanna was a real sticky one!” He rounded the corner, holding up his bloody hands, but paused when he saw the distressed posture and expression of the woman sitting with the berry bowl. “Mei…Hey, you okay? You’re looking right stonkered.”

She turned to him with her brows furrowed. “Jamison…I think we might need to talk.”

Literally anybody else would have had the social accumen to realize the heavy weight those words always carried. Junkrat was not anybody else. He blinked owlishly at her, then his grin returned as he turned and started wiping his red-soaked hands off on a nearby rag. “Oh, sure! Ya wanna talk, we can do it after brekkie.”

“Jamie…”

“Come on come on, Roadie’s waitin’ on ya. Best get on it and eat because trust me, he will go ahead and eat it without ya and you’ll have to eat them diarrhea-bag meals all by your lonesome.” He jabbed a stained thumb back behind him.

At a loss, Mei picked up her bowl full of figs and berries and followed him to their makeshift cooking area. She knew by now that the more observant Roadhog had probably guessed at her agitation, but he said nothing as he took the bowl from her, scattering the figs into a dented porridge pot he had set up over the little stove and nearly emptying an entire honeybear into it after.

Junkrat snorted. “Yeah, that’s nice and all, but you will also notice that I split that goanna from skull to clacker and we are finally having a proper barbecue!” He gestured grandly to the campfire, where the butchered lizard was roasting on a makeshift metal spit. “Now that’s brekkie! You two can have your figgy sludge.”

“I caught it, I get half the lizard too,” Roadhog answered flatly. “That’s brekkie.”

“Oi, rack off!”

Mei smiled despite herself as she watched the pair dissolve into another argument, calmly ladling the porridge meal into her bowl and taking a bite. The fresh figs were slightly gritty in texture, but their natural sweetness was a godsend after the cloying preservative tastes of their other options. She went back for seconds, and even a portion of thirds, whilst listening to the two junkers fight over the lizard. Roadhog eventually settled for the rest of the fig oatmeal and a smaller chunk of the lizard meat. Mei noticed that this time he didn’t turn away from them as he ate, simply lifting up his pig mask to reveal a wide rounded chin, peppered with white-gray beard hairs and severely burnt on one side, his chapped and scarred lips blindly reaching out for the spoonfuls of food he couldn’t really see. It was a little strange to see even that sliver of his real face, surprisingly so, as she had become so used to the expressionless pig mask that she sometimes forgot he was a real person underneath it.

Junkrat hunched over his own meal like a covetous vulture, tearing off steaming bits of flesh with his hands and shoving them into his jaws. It was all a bit primal for Mei’s liking, but at least he had stopped offering the slaughtered animal to her. She was more content with her fig and honey meal, followed by the salty-sweet ruby berries they had gathered earlier. She would have to write about their foraging adventure later, and take notes about this Australian method of survival.

In fact, she had almost forgotten about her notes altogether.

She set her bowl aside, moving to the back of the van and digging around. “Have either of you seen my phone?”

Junkrat looked up, his mouth full of lizard. “Hh?”

“My phone, where is it?”

“Oh, yeah! I forgot to tell ya! Your little robot thing and your phone started beepin’ a lot, and it got real annoying and I yelled at it to shut up, but it wouldn’t, but I knew you’d be pissed if I shut it up all the way, so I just threw them in that box there and put stuff on top so they’d be quiet!”

Mei paused, then resumed her search in earnest, literally throwing things out of the back of the van. “What!? When!”

“Oh, I dunno. Hours back. Woke me up, so I just put ‘em-”

“Oh no. Oh no no no no…” She could hear the beeping now, pulling off mounds of blankets, tarps, and other supplies from one of the larger boxes as the sound got louder and louder. A moment later as she tossed another blanket aside, Snowball immediately hovered out and circled around her, still shrilling an alert call. She grabbed onto it with one arm, as if trying to comfort the little bot as she flicked on her phone. The screen was flashing red and still beeping with the mandarin signals for WARNING scrolling past. She immediately opened it up and began reading through the backlogged messages. “Jamie! You should have told me earlier!”

“What, that your robot was being an annoying cunt and wakin’ people up?”

“Snowball was trying to warn us! Look, it’s more than just my assistant drone, Snowball has short range weather-reading capabilities too…it’s picked something up.” She adjusted her glasses, still scrolling through the messages.

Junkrat rocked back and forth uneasily as he watched Mei’s expression turn more and more alarmed. “Uh…I didn’t…I didn’t know.”

She threw her phone aside and hurried back towards the camp, waving her arms. “Roadhog! Get up, get up, get up, pack everything you can! We have to go NOW.”