Nevada: High Roller (Fallout New Vegas)

Chapter 11: Take Me Home

[Author's Note: Please remember to click 'Vote' on the chapters as it really helps me out! I hope you guys enjoy the chapter! <3]

If, at the beginning of the day, someone had told me that I would have found myself standing face-to-face with my older sister outside of the lavish fire-and-brimstone establishment where she sold her body off to men at a sum of caps per hole by the hour, I would'a gone straight back to bed with a bottle of whiskey to burn that image right out of my brain.

Instead, I stepped through the gate and onto the clean, coal-black tarmac road - the first of which I had ever seen that appeared to be flatter and smoother than a piece of paper, completely free of any cracks, wear-and-tear or any sign that the world had been nuked by atomic bombs - and stepped up onto the smooth grey concrete of the sidewalk beneath the overhead yellow glow of the streetlight.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't a prude or nothing: I'd had my fair share of bright red hickey-necklaces and there was nothing wrong with getting laid. 

            Hell, I'd done it in a gas stop, on the side of a highway, on a saloon counter and one time, in a cemetery -- so I was no stranger to getting it whenever and wherever it happened, whenever I happened to feel like it.

Issue was, nobody ever wants to have to think about their sister in that way. Not like I had much of a choice, given that she tended to talk about her job in the few letters she had sent over the past four years like there wasn't anything else going on in her life besides taking it between silk sheets. 

And I would always know that, while I was doing my best to bring up our younger sister out in the Wasteland and picking up the pieces of everything that had gone wrong over those few months before she walked through the gate into The Strip, Georgia was doing, well... that. 

     I would always know that she chose New Vegas over her family, or what was left of it.

I just wished I had seen it coming sooner, so I wouldn't have felt so stupid in thinking that the three of us would have walked back down Highway 95 together and gone back to our little shack in the hills south of Novac that day.

But now, there she was, right in front of me: my older sister -- the same woman who used to drive Bighorner wagons down the highway with me while belting out the worst renditions of any song unfortunate enough to be played on the radio while she was listening, who used to shove rotten mutfruit in my boots and steal my boxes of Sugar Bombs under the piss-poor excuse of 'being older' even if I always seemed to be the one covering for her, who consistently told me that I looked like a 'moldy loaf of bread' as a baby and who I once threw a severed Gecko head for getting on my nerves -- stood outside the towering black, white and orange monument-like casino, a cigarette resting daintily between her pointer and middle finger.

And I had to pretend that I hadn't just rocked up to New Vegas in time to see her working her corner.

"What- what are you doin' here, N-V?" 

Georgia stared at me in that kind of way you look at a ghost: like it shouldn't fuckin' be there. Perhaps a touch dumbfounded. Her black-lined green eyes searched every inch of my face as if searching for some kind of marker to let her know that it couldn't possibly be me standing before her.