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Vegas has always been the best place to let loose. Take a breather. Stir up some trouble. Hell, even the fallout couldn't fix that.
Neon lights still set the city ablaze, an untouched paradise, protected by wealth and corruption; a bug zapper burning out in the night and drawing in unsuspecting vermin from every corner of the wasteland.
It really hasn't changed much from what he can tell.
The old hotel he puts himself and Lucy up in is on the outskirts of the trade district. It's busier than he'd like; just as shady as he’d hoped. They’ll blend in even better when she gets that godforsaken suit off.
They'd bickered over the bed, of course (his caps, his comfort), until Dogmeat had settled it for them by sprawling across the entire mattress before any valid points could be made.
No matter. Cooper was no stranger to a rickety, wood floor.
Now he waits, back leaned against the edge of the check in counter, lighter pockets and lesser pride.
As always, it does not go as expected. She’s Lucy.
Their trip to the market earlier that day had been an exhausting slog, her wasting daylight running mismatched fingers over the finer fabrics and odder trinkets and every fucking thing she could ogle those big eyes at.
The attention she drew, though, is what had led him to reach in his pocket. The further into the city they followed their prey, the more dangerous her own neon blue and yellow sign that screamed ‘gullible’ would be.
He expects her to go for those frilly fucking Halston blouses with the turned down collars or the Furstenberg dresses dangling from the stall walls that some poor soul or another likely got permanently relieved of. High priced name brands, once upon a time, that he would have been expected to peacock out in and gush over with pride like some tightly saddled, broken-in mare. But he didn’t really give a shit then, just like he doesn't now. He doesn’t even watch her choose, really.
So when she descends the inn stairs in an old, red plaid button-up and worn blue jeans, time does something odd and makes him dizzy. Her white undershirt peaks out through the undone top button. Her chestnut hair is let down and loose around her shoulders. That fucking Pip-boy is missing from her wrist... All in all, it’s a practical choice. Modest and commonplace. Nothing at all remarkable. Nothing at all. As if she’d just come down for a long day of ranch duties rather than to find a decent meal and drink…
Oh, he is so very fucked.
He leads them, eyes forward, to the last spot he knows of in the area that serves a decent ale. Just shy of piss water, sure, but cold and soothing against the nerves.
He is caught off guard once more by the passing of time when he pushes through the swinging doors. It has meant nothing to him for so long that he doesn’t track the months or years anymore. Gave up a while ago on counting out the fruitless, passing days, hours, minutes…
He should have realized though, with the chillier nights and packed markets.
Christmas. Holidays. Human conventions that have burned well away from his mind like the outermost layer of skin. Removed so far from his thoughts and memories that he liked to believe they couldn’t hurt him anymore…
The ceiling of the tavern is absolutely dripping in lights, every color of the rainbow, tangled strands of twinkling merriment crisscrossing without rhyme or reason and dangling along every inch of the roof, like someone has thrown arm-fulls of them up there and hoped they’d stick. Sinatra belts out from the jukebox about not being able to ‘remember a worse December.’ Couples cling and sway across the dancefloor. Cooper finds he has suddenly lost the entirety of his appetite.
“We’re leaving,” he informs, before turning to seek out Lucy’s reaction at his side for confirmation. It’s not a question, exactly, but he’s finding himself waiting for her answer more and more often, despite.
The awe is there in her eyes, of course, just as it always is when encountering any shiny, new experience that Vault Tec has robbed her of. But there’s a flash of heavy, desolate sadness there too that he can’t quite make sense of. There is no reason for one born in a bubble and raised in abundance to look like that at the bright stage set before them. It doesn't match up with her few, fleeting decades of hand crafted experiences.
Then, just as quickly, it’s gone.
“No,” she says, catching him light at the back of the elbow, an unfair parry. “I’d like to stay. I'm hungry — and you’re tired… Let’s just give it a chance.”
It’s how Cooper finds himself, three tankards deep with a pleasant buzz settling at home in his aching bones. Lucy mops up the last of her dinner with a tear of bread. It loosens the tense knot between his shoulder blades and he lets his hat tip the slightest bit higher above his brow. Sits a little more comfortably against the back of his chair.
The lights overhead have grown blurry and all the more beautiful for it. The music turns mournful of winters past. His memories do something similar.
“I always loved Christmastime,” he divulges, and once the lid is open the seams itch to burst. “Pre-war, ya’know? When there was still shit to be hopeful for. Now it just feels like a big waste of time and electricity.”
Lucy takes a pull from her beer. Wipes her little hands on her jeans. His eyes linger on them longer without that oversized wrist-watch impeding his view.
“What did you and your family used to do for the holidays?” she asks, and the answers, once easily tucked away by a sober, well-trained mind, flood back over him like a rolling plume of smoke.
He drums his fingers over the table top. Picks idly at the splintering wood. Fuck it.
“Presents were always on Christmas eve. We’d have friends and family over that day — barbecues, fine wine,” he lifts his piss-beer in a mock toast. “All that shit. Then Christmas day was ours. Just the three of us. Old movies and classic carols… horseback riding in the snowy pasture. Janey spoiled that goddamn horse rotten...”
He's rambling. Lucy hasn’t taken her eyes off him since he’d started. Her smile spreads soft and enamored.
“Sounds like plenty of reason for hope to me.”
They’re dead, he wants to say again, a record scratching over and over again until the original tune is unrecognizable, or worse, he locks his jaw because they’ve had this conversation with various outcomes at least a dozen times now, but all the fight has left him this time round with just how sure of herself she seems.
“Does tradition help?” she asks him earnestly, straight through his fiery glare.
“Huh?”
“Tradition. In the vault whenever things started to get a little out of hand or when we felt sorta down, we would fall back on our basic principles. Holidays were kind of treated the same way. We’d celebrate despite it all. Exchange gifts,” she glances down over her new digs. Looks right fucking back at him. “‘Keep your head up’. ‘Do good unto others’. That sort of thing. And you’ve been kinda — well, nice today,” she accuses, “and now I think I’m starting to understand why... Does it help you? Because it helps me sometimes. To remember.”
“I’m not nice,” he grits out. “And nothin’ fuckin’ helps anymore.”
Lucy nods in a too-overt show of understanding, as if soothing a pouting babe instead of a crumbling mound of irradiated resentment.
“Lying on Christmas. Wow,” she chides, all mirth. Her gaze sweeps about the tavern, the lights glinting like mischief in her eyes. “We’ll see.”
Two more beers, some sort of warm, cakey bourbon bullshit, and a hand atop his is all it takes. “I want to dance," she’d beckoned. “It’s tradition, after all. And no one else will join me with you looking at them like that…”
Like what? he wants to ask, but she has her arms wrapped around his neck in the center of the crowded, stuffy room before he can decide where to place his own palms. She sways him to that Bing Crosby song about dreaming and maybe he is.
“Lucy…”
“We would have a winter ball every year,” her mouth moves against his collarbone while he fights for his life. She smells of cinnamon and alcohol. The warmth in his arms and against his chest is just as intoxicating. She’s drunk, she has to be, though she's only polished off a single round… “They would project falling snow on the walls so we could pretend like we were outside for a while… so it would feel more — real. Can you believe that?” He can feel her lips curve up, nudging his lapel. “Guess I’ll never know now.”
Cooper’s hands finally decide to rest around the center of her back. He’s never felt more ungrateful in his life.
“It snows every once ‘n a while durin’ a nuclear winter,” he tugs her in the slightest bit closer as if she could prevent the chill of the claim from reaching his skin. “You still have a chance to see it fall, it’s just radioactive and will rot you slow from the inside out...”
She laughs. Right against him. Real and unguarded against his neck. He's smiling too, in spite of himself. It's the greatest gift she could have ever given him. "How whimsical,” she breathes into the same spot. Her loose hair tickles the side of his throat and he fights the urge to shiver away from it all. To take her with him. “But thank you,” Lucy presses soft, supple lips quick and light against a coarse, blistered cheek. He loses the fight, like always. “Merry Christmas to you, too.”
And oh ho ho, he is so so fucked.