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Jacob was silent as he led Sarah through the night, partly because he was afraid of giving away their position to anything unfriendly, but mostly because he just wanted quiet, and to be alone. Once the sun had fallen below the horizon he used his night vision to set them on a course back towards the highway running east, at a very oblique angle from the town to avoid being seen. The truth was Jacob wasn't even sure if they would find it; they had run blindly into the desert without sense of direction and he couldn't say how far they had gone.

As he walked he worried that another of his worst nightmares may come true: being lost in the wastes. But really, how did that matter when he had just lost the one person on earth who had given him a sense of purpose and comfort in a world that offered neither? Even if he made it out of the wastes and to New Vegas, what was there to live for? Without Joshua to care for, he didn't know what he would do. He supposed that he would do what he had always done- survive, for now at least.

He kept walking, Sarah trailing close behind, until early in the morning just before the sky began to turn deep purple when he found a low flat surface cutting through the desert in a straight line. He had found the road. He stopped and turned, looking back west where Sweet Glenn, and Joshua, lay invisible in the darkness.

"Jacob?" Sarah asked in a whisper.

"We could go back, circle around. Get him back." Jacob said, surprised at how heavy with emotion his own voice sounded and how the words tumbled from his muzzle.

"So help me god, if I have to drag you all the way to New Vegas myself..." Sarah said in frustration.

Jacob stared in the direction of the town for several long minutes before turning and heading east along the highway. _____

They stopped just before midday to rest and eat a small lunch. They huddled behind a couple rocks that shielded them from view as they ate in silence. Jacob stared absently at a point in the cracked ground between them, or rather through it, as he shoved food into his mouth without tasting it. Walking through the desert today reminded Jacob of how he had walked together with Joshua through the desert, and was startled to realize that it had only been a week or so since they had escaped the Fort together. Joshua's optimistic cluelessness about survival had annoyed Jacob at the time, but now as he walked in silence with Sarah he realized how much he missed it. Joshua was dead, and he would never walk this desert road with him again.

"Listen, Jacob." Sarah said abruptly. "I know I've been really... pushy, but that was just so you would keep moving." she was looking up at him now, it was the first time he had seen her with compassion written across her features. "I really am sorry about what happened back there."

Hearing Sarah say this, a human who herself had helped ensure Joshua's slavery, it made something snap inside Jacob. He locked his teeth together and his fur bristled as he stared at her. "Sorry!" he roared suddenly, making Sarah recoil in surprise. "Why the fuck do you care? You helped him in prison for his entire fucking life!" he yelled at the top of his lungs, pointing a shaking finger at her.

Instead of arguing, she only sat staring at him wide-eyed as she edged away slightly, and it only made Jacob angrier. "He had nothing but that goddamn cell his whole life! It was your people who made his father fuck his cousin and get her pregnant just so you would have another slave in the future!" the words tumbled from his muzzle in a rush.

"His parents - cousins? I..."

Jacob continued his tirade, cutting her off, "And I was the only one able to give him something, give him a future, and I fucking let him get shot in the head!"

"Jacob that wasn't your..."

"And those goddamned raiders! If they hadn't shown up I could have saved him! He'd be here with us now!" he yelled as his anger grew and grew, his voice beginning to go hoarse and pointed to a painfully empty spot where Joshua might have sat. He sat staring at a pale Sarah for several seconds before his gaze fell to his carbine at his side and a sudden impulse and rush of adrenaline consumed him. He grabbed the rifle and stood and headed around the rocks and back along the road towards the town. He released the magazine and checked to make sure it was full before slamming it home with more force than necessary and chambered a round.

"Jacob!" Sarah appeared, running to catch up. "What are you doing?" she cried.

"Going to kill the fucks who murdered Joshua." he growled without looking at her or stopping.

"Are you insane? At least thirty were at the ambush and their whole damn army is probably there by now!" she walked beside him, staring at him in exasperation.

"I don't care, I'll take as many with me as I can." Jacob retorted but suddenly Sarah's hand shot out and gripped his arm and spun him around to face her.

"Dammit, Jacob, don't think I don't know what you're doing! There's no difference between letting them blow you away and pulling the trigger yourself! Do you think Joshua would want you to do this? I've seen him help dozens of people like you at a cost to himself!" Sarah yelled and jabbed a finger into Jacob's chest. "And you! Of all people! I could see the way he cared about you!"

Jacob barred his sharp teeth as he towered over her by a head and stared at her furiously. "Have you ever lost someone? You have no fucking idea..."

"I lost my father to raiders!" Sarah's voice rose to a scream as she stabbed a quivering finger back along the road. "And a week ago I lost my home and all the people I've ever known for my whole life!"

Just as the urge to strike out was boiling within Jacob, it was as if someone had just released the steam from a kettle about to burst. Images of the murder of his family and friends in his home Vault flashed before his eyes, of losing the rest on the way to Junktown, losing Daniel, and then Joshua. He closed his mouth as his shoulders and ears slumped, he felt tired, so tired. He looked down at his rifle, held loosely now in his paws, and down at himself in his worn dark duster. Almost his entire life was filled with loss and regret, and he hid it behind a rough and threatening exterior, and Joshua had seen that.

"You and me, we're not that different." Sarah said quietly.

Jacob drew his gaze back up to her face. "Yeah, maybe not." he rasped.

They stood staring at each other for a long time before Sarah finally spoke again, "Come on, let's go."

Jacob followed her back to where they had sat for lunch, realizing with surprise that in his fit of rage he had left his pack sitting on the ground. He slung it onto his back and walked with Sarah along the road, side by side. "You said the raiders killed your father." he said after a long time, putting it more as a statement than a question.

She nodded. "I was born in a town east of New Vegas, I think it was called Nelson. My mother died giving birth, and my father waited until I was old enough before taking a job with the Crimson Caravan." she said. "We lived on the road, never staying in one place for more than a week. When I was about thirteen he took up a job to deliver goods from New Vegas to a place called "the Hub"."

"I passed through there when I was young, on my way to Junktown." Jacob mentioned.

"We walked along this same road." Sarah continued. "It was a new route, nobody came this way because there were rumors of ghosts with rifles that would decimate an entire caravan and melt away into the wastes." she snorted mirthlessly. "My father figured that if we went with enough men and well armed enough, we would be just fine. As luck would have it, just a day after passing through that town back there we were ambushed by raiders, different from these ones, a bunch of morphs. Anyway, my father got killed in the fighting."

Jacob was silent. So that's why she had hated morphs so much. "How did you end up at the Fort then?" he asked.

"Those rumored "ghosts" saved me, and it turned out they were scouts from the Fort, and Twitch was one of them. At that point I was the only survivor, so they scavenged what they could from the caravan and took me to the Fort. The Warden placed me under his direct care, but turned a blind fucking eye when Twitch raped me over and over again."

Jacob didn't know what to say, and so he was quiet for a while until Sarah spoke again suddenly, "What about you? You never did say how you got to Junktown."

Jacob sighed and began to to tell of the Vault he was born in and the massacre within, and how he had spent nearly two years making it through the Mojave and staying in the Hub before moving on.

Sarah hesitated a bit when he left off with meeting Daniel, but asked anyway, "How did you not realize he loved you?"

Anger flared up within Jacob once more, initially at the fact that Sarah dare ask him that, and then with himself. Another sigh passed his lips, it was a question that deserved a better answer than he could give. "I don't know." he said. "I guess really that I didn't want to face the fact... the crush I had on that girl... I was so focused on her that I didn't want to deal with anything else. I reasoned that the sex was just blowing off steam, or that it was just because Elizabeth wasn't available."

"You fucked and didn't even think..."

"I did, okay?" Jacob snapped. "I did, but I didn't want to think about it, didn't want to admit..."

"That you like males too." Sarah finished before adding, "You know, Jacob, the idea of two guys screwing is pretty disgusting, but there's a lot of fucked up things in the world and that definitely isn't the worst."

"Yeah, I guess so." Jacob said and shook his head. "And when I finally admit it, to Joshua and myself, I lose him." he said, his paw going to the ring still hanging by the chain around his neck and turning it over in his fingers.

Sarah was quiet now, which was fine, as it let Jacob think. If he had just taken the shot a few seconds earlier, Joshua might still be alive. If he hadn't been so stupid and let his guard down, or let them stay that long in the town when he knew there were raiders out there. It wasn't so different from what had happened with Daniel, Jacob realized - what he had done had caused his own loss, and the loss of others. The people he cared for always ended up getting hurt because of him.

Jacob made a silent vow, a reaffirmation of an oath he had made to himself years ago: never again would he let himself care for someone as deeply as he had Daniel or Joshua. He didn't want to feel the pain that he had felt then and now ever again, even if it left him with nothing but loneliness welling in his heart for the rest of his life.

_____

"We're going to have to get in cover." Sarah said suddenly in the early evening.

"We still have a few hours of sunlight." Jacob replied, glancing over his shoulder back at the sun hanging above the western horizon.

"No, look." Sarah said, pointing off to the south. "There's a storm coming."

Jacob followed her finger and saw that dark clouds were gathering on the southern horizon, illuminated briefly with flashes of light, and he realized that the wind was starting to pick up. "I've seen those before." Jacob said. "Shouldn't be any rain, just a little dark and windy."

Sarah shook her head. "You didn't see the dust-storm those can kick up. We need to find cover." she said, and when Jacob looked doubtful added, "I've lived out here most of my life, you've been out here for a few months."

Jacob followed reluctantly as she began to search for some kind of shelter, which wouldn't be easy to come by in the wastes. They split up but stayed within shouting distance as they searched with increasing frenzy, but just as Jacob found a small cave that he decided would have to do, he heard Sarah shout from the other side of a small ridge. He left the rock cavity behind and scrambled over the ridge and wound up standing shoulder to shoulder with Sarah.

"You're kidding, right?" he said incredulously. A small rusty and flimsy corrugated metal shack stood a short distance from the foundation of a house long-since blown into a pile a wood. "That thing is going to get blown away."

"You got any better options?" Sarah asked sharply. Jacob was about to mention the cave he found, but she was right, the opening would leave them exposed. When he remained silent Sarah led the way down to the shed and wrenched open the door to find it empty save for a few tools laying forgotten on some bare shelves. "Let's gather some firewood." she said as she looked up at the cracks in the shack's metal ceiling.

Jacob arched an eyebrow. "That's a little dangerous, the raiders..."

"Won't see shit through the sand." Sarah stated. "You'll thank me later."

"What if there's no sandsto..." Jacob trailed off mid-sentence as he looked off to the south. A veritable wall of dust at least a couple miles high was advancing toward them, seemingly have appeared out of nowhere.

"Let's go!" Sarah cried and began to leapt to the remaining flinders of the house, scooping up the wood and tossing it into the shack as fast as she could. Jacob quickly moved to aid her, the sky darkening as the cloud of dust advanced rapidly. The storm was almost upon them by the time they dived into the shed and Sarah slammed the door shut and buttressed it with a sturdy board. Immediately they were thrown into darkness as the door closed, and then the wind hit with a thundering roar as it scoured the surface of the shack with the sand it carried. The combination of darkness and howling wind was unsettling to say the least.

Jacob used his weapon light to clear a space for a small fire that when lit, revealed that the shack seemed even smaller from the inside than it did outside, about only ten feet square. He stared around at the thin walls as they were battered by the wind and sand, making an atrocious racket that blocked out every other sound. He hoped the walls of the shack would hold.

Sarah sat down, leaning against a couple smooth boards instead of the metal walls, and Jacob found out why - when he sat and leaned against them himself he could feel the shuddering and the sand blasting against it, reminding him of just how thin their protection was. He had sat up his pack and leaned back against it like he had done many times when suddenly something hard and lumpy jutted into his side as his duster shifted, making him wince. He dug into his pocket to move the item when his paw clasped the 10mm pistol he had taken from the Warden, he had completely forgotten that he even had it.

He pulled it out of his pocket and looked over it, noticing that Sarah was eyeing him apprehensively. He waved her off, unable to speak over the racket, and stared at the weapon that had been used to kill Joshua. Some dried blood was still caked on it in places, whose it was Jacob didn't know or want to know, but the wear-marks looked familiar. This was his pistol, the one his father had given him, the one the Warden had taken and kept for himself, and now the one that had ended Joshua's life.

He stared down at the handgun, running his fingers over where the paint had long since worn away where his paws gripped it. He remembered everything he had been through since his father had shoved this weapon into his young paws, how many times it had saved his life, and how many others he had taken with it. Then before his eyes flashed the image burned into his mind, that of Joshua looking into his eyes, terrified and begging for Jacob's help, and then his eyes rolling back into his head as he died.

Jacob's eyes slid back into focus on the weapon in his paws and a glinting at his chest drew his eyes to the ring Joshua had given him and as he turned the polished metal over in his fingers he remembered what Joshua had told him: that he had to let his past go, that he had to move on.

He pressed the magazine release and pulled out the half-full mag... It may be the only thing he had left from his father, it may have saved him many times... He pulled the slide back and emptied the chamber... He may be a survivor, and survivors didn't throw away tools... He released the slide from the frame... But he didn't want to just survive anymore.

He tossed the pieces of the 10mm into the center of the fire. Sarah looked at the weapon and then up at him but said nothing and made no move to grab the pieces. He spent a long time staring at the pistol pieces as they grew red-hot in the fire, the metal slowly warping in the heat, listening to the moaning roar of the wind. Eventually Jacob pulled his rolled blanket from his pack and set it under his head and laid flat, trying to sleep through the cacophony of the quaking shack and the clamor of the wind.

_____

Jacob woke with a start from an intense nightmare in which he had shot and killed both Daniel and Joshua. A man had forced him against his will, at first it was a faceless NCR soldier, then Twitch, the Warden, and finally a twisted raider. Once again he grabbed for the 9mm he had left laying on his chest, startled that the roaring wind was absent, but relaxed when he saw Sarah sitting on the other side of the shack, cooking breakfast on the low fire.

"The sun hasn't come up yet." Sarah said, answering Jacob's question before he could ask it. "Thought we should eat before we get moving."

Jacob nodded and stowed his 9mm in a pocket as he sat up. He unfurled the map he had taken from the grocery and read it by the flickering light of the fire. "The next stop is three days away, maybe two if we walk through the night." he said before handing the map to Sarah and pointing to the next dot on I-15. "You must have passed through there as a kid, do you remember if there's any kind of settlement there?"

"Baker..." Sarah stared at the map, searching her memory as she drew her finger along the thin dusty paper. She shook her head and said, "No, I don't think so. The last town I remember us leaving was only a few days out from New Vegas, probably this one, Primm. Although there may have been some traders passing through there..."

Jacob frowned and pulled the map back towards him. If indeed the next settlement was indeed as far as Primm, they wouldn't have any measure of safety from the raiders for quite a while. He stowed the map when breakfast was ready and ate, not tasting the food much as he thought deeply. How long could they keep this pace up? How long could the raiders?

One question nagged at him more than the others though: why were the raiders chasing them this fervently, and all the way from the Fort? Raiders didn't normally operate like this, surely the reward from capturing a handful ragtag survivors didn't outweigh the energy and resources they were expending. Hadn't they gotten enough from their raid on the Fort? Unless their psychotic fetish for violence had overcome their usual method of operation., something didn't add up.

He sat and stewed on this until they had finished eating, and then they packed up quickly and extinguished the fire before stepping outside into the pre-dawn darkness. Jacob froze, his ears perked, just after closing the door to the shed behind him.

"What?" Sarah asked him but he motioned for silence and listened closely. "What is it?" Sarah insisted.

Jacob shot an annoyed look at her that she probably couldn't even see before scrambling up onto a rock outcropping. "Gunfire, in the distance." Jacob whispered as he pulled his binoculars from a pocket and searched the western horizon near the highway and sure enough, he found small spats of light illuminating the darkness.

"Gunfire? Do you think the raiders are fighting each other?" Sarah asked as she accepted the proffered binoculars and gazed through them.

"I don't know." Jacob said grimly. "But they're closer than I'd like, and we should get moving while they're busy." Without a word he accepted the binoculars back, stuffed them into his pocket, and together they melted away in the darkness. He led them onto the highway so they could move faster in the dark, urged on with the knowledge of just how close the raiders were.

As the sky began to grow lighter ahead of them Jacob hoped that indeed the raiders were fighting amongst themselves. If they were busy tearing into each other then maybe they'd give up the chase and he and Sarah would be able to get away. Somehow though, Jacob felt like that wouldn't be the case. Something told him that he and Sarah were in for a lot of trouble, and broke into a jog as soon as the sun broke the horizon ahead.